“Indie Interfaces” is an intimate industry-academic symposium designed to facilitate knowledge exchange between academics and influential actors working in the field of indie games. Held in Montréal, a city renowned for its diverse and vibrant game development communities, this pathbreaking event will combine roundtable discussions among industry attendees and academic research presentations to foster productive, critical dialogue and collaboration. Moving beyond definitional debates about what counts as indie, this symposium is intended to stimulate innovative, interdisciplinary academic work that can feed forward into game industry practices.read more

Followers of the blog may be interested in the cfp below. Just as interesting is the news that this is part of a what sounds like a really exciting new series coming from Bloomsbury Academic.

We are soliciting chapter proposals for a volume tentatively entitled The Casino Games and Classic Card Games Reader: Communities, Cultures, and Play. This volume would be the first in a new series under consideration at Bloomsbury Academic entitled Play Beyond the Computer.read more

The Board Game Studies Colloquium is an annual event which gathers a wide range of scholars, curators, inventors, collectors, and enthusiasts from around the world to present and discuss new research in the burgeoning field of game studies. It has traditionally focused on historical board, card, and dice games, but later years have begun to feel the impact from the current explosion in non-digital gaming. This year, too, we would like to welcome speakers from both sides of the game board, so to speak, in an attempt to further our collective understanding of the origins and development of contemporary games.read more

Members of the network may be interested in the Historia Ludens conference at the University of Huddersfield (11 Feb 2017):

This conference follows up on the workshop “Playing with History” that has been held in November 2015 in Huddersfield. Gaming and History is gaining more and more traction, either as means to “gamify” history education or museum experiences, or as computer games as prism into history like the popular History Respawned podcast series (http://www.historyrespawned.com/).read more

This call for submissions for work on ‘Power, Freedom, and Control in Gaming’ for a special issue of The Velvet Light Trap might be of interest to readers.

The Velvet Light Trap Issue #81 – Power, Freedom, and Control in Gaming Game studies is no longer an ‘emerging’ field and video games can no longer be considered a ‘new’ or niche medium. The commercial video game industry is now over 40 years old and games are an increasingly intrinsic part of the symbolic terrain of culture. The continued economic growth of the global video game industry is well documented and staggering, and this is reflected in the growing body of academic work that engages with the multifaceted ways that games are designed, created, received, and played. In recent years, scholars have productively moved away from the hotly contested theoretical divisions between ludology and narratology that defined early game studies. Yet, at the same time, games scholarship continues to privilege digital gaming, in the process often sidelining or excluding from academic discussions the vibrant range of game design paradigms and player practices in non-digital gaming, such as board games, card games, and role-playing games. This issue of The Velvet Light Trap considers the place of gaming within media studies and the potential value of utilizing a cultural studies framework for understanding issues of power, freedom, and control in game studies.read more

The Games Research Network (GRN) conducts research into games and gaming. Our focus is on both digital and analogue platforms, and the intersection between the two.

Our blog also includes details about relevant external events and seminars on the topics of games and gaming and we invite organisers to contact us with details of forthcoming events.